The diagnostic for PE operating partners and CFOs at $50M–$500M mid-market companies. Three documents, ninety minutes, one page. The output is the artifact you walk to your CEO, your CFO, or your investment committee.
Take a $150M revenue mid-market company at 12% EBITDA margin. That is $18M of EBITDA on the trailing twelve months — the median company in the SEAS target range. A 3% revenue leakage on $150M is $4.5M. On an $18M EBITDA base, that is 25% of total profit. Leaking out the bottom of the P&L. Every year. While the executive team reads transformation articles.
| Leakage Category | Annual Waste | Recoverable | Capture Method |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supply Chain Inefficiency | $6.0M | $2.5M | Predictive demand, autonomous reordering |
| Legacy Administrative Burden | $4.0M | $1.8M | AP/AR automation, RAG workflows |
| Energy and Operations Waste | $2.0M | $1.0M | HVAC scheduling, predictive maintenance |
| Total | $12.0M | $5.3M | 12–18 months, no capex |
FLOAT operates on three documents you already have: the trailing twelve-month P&L, the SG&A breakdown by department, and the vendor concentration report. If you cannot pull these in fifteen minutes, the data infrastructure is the leakage — and that is itself a finding.
The deployment starts with a vendor demo, not a P&L line. The vendor optimizes the line easiest for the vendor to address — not the line that is bleeding cash. FLOAT prevents this by starting with the diagnostic.
A pilot succeeds. Three more workflows are added before the first stabilises. By month nine, the steering committee meets every two weeks to triage exceptions instead of measure outcomes. Antidote: phase gates with non-negotiable criteria.
The pilot has no named owner. AI sits in the middle of the org chart — not IT, not Finance, not Operations. The antidote is structural: put the CFO on the hook, because EBITDA is the metric.
Ten chapters. A foreword. A diagnostic worksheet. The 13-line ROI calculator. The 14-day path from diagnostic to pilot kickoff. Free.
The fourteen days between diagnostic and pilot kickoff are where most companies lose momentum. Sixty days of inertia at $12,500 per day is $750,000 gone — the price of reading and not acting.
Block 90 minutes. Pull the three documents. Run the three pockets. Write the named pilot workflow at the top of a separate page. Put your name underneath. You are now the named owner.
Email three vendors that can deliver the named workflow. Five-sentence email. Subject line: "Pilot opportunity — [company] — [workflow] — Q1 demo." If a vendor does not respond within 48 hours, replace them.
Three demos. Same scoring sheet. Seven non-negotiable questions: timeline to Gate 1, pilot pricing, accuracy at week 8, three reference customers, ERP integration, kill-switch protocol, SLA refund triggers.
Three calls. Fifteen minutes each. Three questions: How long was the actual pilot? What was actual accuracy at Gate 1 versus what was promised? Would you choose the same vendor again?
Five sections: diagnostic results, selected pilot, risk mitigation, decision required, timeline. Walk it to the CEO. Fifteen minutes. The pilot has a start date by Friday afternoon.
The diagnostic is free. The worksheet is yours to keep. The 14-day path from diagnostic to pilot kickoff is in Chapter 9. There is no upsell embedded in the diagnostic itself.